BASE TRAINING

Most of us will be entering the BASE TRAINING phase after New Year's.   The purpose of this post is to address AET (Aerobic Endurance Training) and how to measure your progress.

AET is important in the BASE phase for any endurance athlete and is the source of cardio fitness.   These workouts build our capability to transfer oxygen to our muscles and carbon dioxide out of them.   This fundamental capability must me developed before training other systems is beneficial.

For years, athletes both running and riding, thought this was accomplished by LSD (Long Slow Days) or group rides.   I think you can get there that way.  However, steady state intervals are the shortest route to the goal.   These are simple.  You ride at Z2 HR for about 1-1:15 hours and progress to 2.5 hour intervals, for most of us.  You must pick a fairly flat route with few/no stops (or a trainer if you are crazy).   WARNING: THIS SHOULD BE DONE SOLO TO BE EFFECTIVE.   These workouts can create great progress in just 3 weeks.  I have reasoned that this is because so much time is logged in Z2 as compared to group rides.   These rides (again, AET rides) are a really efficient use of training time.   While they take focus, the pace is fairly comfortable.   Little fatigue occurs and one can recover, usually in 24 hours.  You see, riding the UWBL going like hell, does not HURT you but if you are in Z4 or Z5, you ain't in Z2.  If you are in the bag for two days, you can't do another quality AET ride or might even get the flu or something worse?  Of course, some of us may be so strong, that the UWBL does not effect us this way!

Later, we will move the training to Z3 but that is another phase.

Weinacker, Perry and anybody else doing long distance racing, will find this type training even more valuable.   They will likely want to extend these intervals to as long as 4-5 hours.  They might do very little training above Z2 if they were only doing Ironman distance.  Perry, is a great source of info on this subject.  There is Wikipedia and then there is WikiPerry..........and I am not kidding.......the dude is amazing.

So, one might ask, "How long do I do this type training?"  Answer:  It depends.  If you are 'off the couch' or in your first year or so, it might be 8-10 weeks.   If you are an advanced athlete and have been active in the off season, you might need little of this other than maintenance.

What is cool is that Coach Joe and WKO+ have devised measurement methods to test your aerobic fitness.  Here are a couple of terms you need to understand:

Cardio Drift - When an endurance athlete maintains a steady state effort, his/her heart rate will rise over the course of the effort.

Decoupling - The measurement of cardio drift, described in percent.  In cycling, it can be measured as Power:HR and in running it would Pace:HR.

WKO+ automatically calculates decoupling but we can do it manually and without a power meter or WKO+.  A HR monitor and speedometer is required.

Joe believes that when you can perform these AET workouts with less than 5% decoupling, you are aerobically fit.   This means more time to work on Muscular Endurance, a limiter for almost every athlete.   The athlete/coach monitors decoupling as the season progresses and if performance degrades,  the athlete can return to 2-3 weeks of these intervals (likely one per week) to reestablish fitness.

A great thing for those of us without power meters, would be to set up these tests on the computrainers at the EDGE.  I will stay on the road as I just can't ride a trainer that long....even with friends suffering along side me!   I could set up the test protocol.  

In my next training post, I will address computing decoupling with an HR monitor and speedometer.